If you’ve done your best to close all associated processes but are still encountering error messages, then your only option may be to restart your Mac. If you’re unable to track down all of an application’s processes, then it’s possible that this app may continue to linger in the background, triggering more error messages. While forcing quitting all of an application’s processes is usually enough to resolve the issue, some apps have a large number of processes, or strangely-named processes that aren’t easy to spot in the Activity Monitor. Read the warning dialogue and, if you’re happy to proceed, click ‘Force Quit.’.

To force quit a process, select it and then click the little ‘X’ button (where the cursor is positioned in the following screenshot).If your search returns any processes you’re unsure about, then researching this process online can usually turn up all the information you need to decide whether it’s safe for you to hit that ‘force quit’ button or not. Note that this may include processes that are not related to the application in question, so automatically force quitting every process in this list may have negative consequences for other applications or even the wider macOS system. Activity Monitor will display all the currently-active processes that include this search term.In the ‘Search’ bar, enter the name of the application that’s been causing you problems, such as ‘Safari’ or ‘Preview.’.Make sure the Activity Monitor’s ‘CPU’ tab is selected.Open a Finder window and navigate to ‘Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.’.If the application doesn’t appear in the ‘Force Quit’ menu, then it’s time to dig a bit deeper and kill the process (or processes) that are associated with this application: Relaunch the app to see whether this easy fix has solved your problem.

If the misbehaving app appears in this list, then select it and click ‘Force Quit.’

The subsequent popup displays a list of all the apps that are currently running on your Mac.

Click the ‘Apple’ logo in your Mac’s menu bar.

Your Mac can only force quit apps that it detects as being open, so misbehaving applications won’t always appear in the ‘Force Quit’ menu, but since this is the easiest method it’s always worth a shot:

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